Mihai Guran

Inspirational leader| Professional business manager| Consultant

Mihai Guran

Inspirational leader| Professional business manager| Consultant

Biography

Mihai worked in various business management roles across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), Western Europe, Middle East, United States of America and Canada. As a sales person he managed important national projects for CFR railways (IRIS project), the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Labor and TAROM in Romania. Working for Dell, Mihai built a team that grew sales more than 5 times over 3 years by developing all market segments and the channel partners. For HP, Mihai was a Business Unit Manager, leading the teams in charge of the Enterprise sales for servers, storage, networking and infrastructure services, raising market shares of solutions in the portfolio by selling direct or via channels in Romania, and then across other 13 countries in South-East Europe.

During Bitdefender tenure, the objective was to ignite and accelerate Enterprise sales growth by developing almost from scratch a professional Enterprise sales team and the channel partner network in key markets – North America, Central Europe including France and Germany, UK, Nordic countries Spain, Romania and Middle East. In order to manage the teams, Mihai designed and developed the sales and sales management structures, the business plan review processes, as well as the sales operations team in Bitdefender, implementing new tools and developing new processes. Using salesforce.com for fostering collaboration across the globe, the teams led by Mihai delivered significant growth in business product and services sales, enabling Bitdefender to advance in Gartner Magic Quadrant and to attract a new investor as a significant shareholder.

Known as an inspirational leader and professional manager, Mihai Guran recruited over 200 people for Dell, HP and Bitdefender, from California to Dubai, influencing their success and careers.

Topic: “Building a Global Sales Operations”

Synopsis: Many of us we are working (or used to work) for American, British, French or German companies, learning how to deliver a business project in a professional way. However, not many Romanian companies, selling products made in Romania have built a sales team at Global level.

Building such a team is similar to a complex project, taking a few years to deliver. Considering the length in time, the resources and the constraints, we could say that it was not easy to make it happen, but we did it – recruiting the people, planning and delivering the framework for business development, planning and delivering the tools and processes that are needed to run such an operation, working across almost all company departments.

The external and internal environments were dynamic and competitive, therefore continuously adapting to changes was the most difficult challenge. A few tips and tricks that can help will be shared – preparing changes, getting feedback across all management layers, communicating in order to inspire people and keep everybody engaged. A bit of luck, but also the team professionalism, careful planning and the right attitude will help the most.